Manufacturers and consumers alike better brace themselves: memory chip prices have hit a two-year high because of a major fire in a massive Chinese production plant.

Bloomberg is reporting that a fire at the SK Hynix plant in China has been instrumental in bringing about a 42 percent rise in memory prices. It points out that a "benchmark DDR3 2-gigabit dynamic random-access memory chip reached $2.27 yesterday, compared with $1.60 on September 4th," which was the day of the fire.

SK Hynix is the world’s second-largest producer of memory chips, and its customers include Apple, Sony and Dell. Despite ramping up production elsewhere, prices have increased massively, and its expected that the trend will continue through the fourth quarter. Now, clearly, is not the time to buy RAM—or be a manufacturer looking to procure a pile of the stuff. [Bloomberg]